Health

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I have no title today (other than “doctor”)

I don’t think I’ll probably write very much today‒though I’ve been wrong about that many times before, so I guess I’ll have to wait and see.  I feel particularly tired already this morning, but that didn’t let me sleep uninterrupted for more than a few hours.  So far today I’m not in as much pain as I was the previous two days, but then again, on neither of those two days was my pain as prominent in the morning as it became during the day, so I cannot be too optimistic.

I am, of course, trying all my various adjustments and interventions and so on to try to improve things, and they have limited and temporary success in general.  But I will keep trying, until the day that I finally give up and/or die.  I suppose, of course, that I might even get better.  It’s physically possible.  But I’m not going to hold my breath, because I’ve tried many, many things to improve my pain, and they have not had much success.

With that in mind, unless you have something truly esoteric that you think I, a physician with a broadly curious mind and with chronic pain, will not have encountered or considered, I don’t encourage recommending or suggesting pain treatments to me.  You can of course, and I truly appreciate the sentiments involved in such offers, but they are often frustrating.  Also, when people recommend things that I know are just woo, it’s additionally frustrating to have to remind myself not to respond impolitely.  Good intentions aren’t enough to make good things actually happen, but they are worth taking into consideration and appreciating.  You shouldn’t be rude to people who are trying to help, even if they aren’t succeeding.

Anyway, my new thing that I mentioned yesterday did not arrive; it’s supposed to arrive today, now, having been delayed.  I won’t get into it yet, but I maintain my stupid pseudo-optimism, which I cannot explain nor justify, except to say that I’m stubborn.  But I have my limits.

It’s been a string of rather frustrating days, lately, and though none of the frustrations are catastrophic, in some ways that makes them more pernicious.  With major setbacks, one is allowed and expected to need a real recovery process, a bit of time, a bit of rest, or maybe just some sympathy.  One gets a break.  With more minor setbacks, one gets no respite, but they can nonetheless pile up, especially if one has chronic issues already.  But one will gain little ease from others with respect to them.

For instance, when I mentioned to a coworker that I was having a lot of frustrating things happen over the past several days, I got a reply that everyone was having a rough time‒based on what data, I don’t know.  His rough times apparently have to do with taking his daughter to the doctor for a thankfully not too severe issue and his wife being sick and so on.  I would give almost anything possible to have such “problems” again, or just to be able to be with my children in a significant way again.

Anyway, I was not terribly pleased, and in response to his statement about the claimed recent local preponderance of irritations, I said, “Well, that makes everything all right, then, doesn’t it?”

It wasn’t the cleverest of replies, but at least I was channeling the Toymaker a bit.

Anyway, I’m sure few or none of you readers are particularly sympathetic, either.  Why would you be?  I’m no one and nothing, just a weird little “voice” on the internet/web.  I’m a wisp of marsh gas, a flicker of movement in the corner of your vision, an occasionally annoying afterthought, like the water that gets on your shirt at the waist from doing the dishes, but that you don’t notice until you’re done.  I’m a tiny little grain of rock that gets on the bottom of your foot inside your shoe; it’s not quite bad enough to force you to stop, take off your shoe, and clear it out, but it’s there all the while, and you end up with a blister and other aches at the end of the day, from changing the way you walk.

So, yeah, that’s me.  That’s how I feel today.  I know, it doesn’t matter to anyone, but there it is.  Maybe today will be better than yesterday.

I wish I could say it couldn’t be worse, but that’s never true.  Reality has no lowest level.  Things can always deteriorate.

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A random, walk-in blog post

It’s Monday again, despite popular demand, and I am here writing another blog post‒not necessarily against or by popular demand.  It’s really more or less orthogonal to such things.

I had a weekend full of little setbacks, and it was quite frustrating.  I had committed to riding my bike four times this weekend, and I started in good form.  I got out relatively early and went riding.  It felt pretty good, pretty comfortable, but I decided not to push too hard, only riding out about 3 miles.  Walking 3 miles is relatively far if it’s hot, but biking 3 miles is not bad at all.

Then, of course, just after I turned around, my rear tire lost pressure.  I don’t know where the puncture was, but I had to walk the bike back to the house.  And 3 miles walking a bike is much more unpleasant than riding or even walking without a bike.

I ordered some Slime brand tire repair stuff for same day delivery, but then it got delayed till Sunday (it actually arrived very late Saturday night).  Then, on Sunday, in between loads of laundry, I tried to repair the tire (so to speak) but at first I had trouble getting it to work, and it wouldn’t stay inflated.  Finally, though, it seemed to stabilize, at least without my fat ass on it.

I was going to go for a short ride to test it, but I couldn’t stand the idea that I might have to walk it back again.  So I went for about a 2 mile walk instead, which is really not very far, but then overnight and into now my back really flared up and is annoying the heck out of me.  Also, my right ankle is sore again.

So I’m frustrated in my attempt to develop better habits and health.  I also had some failures by Uber Eats that were annoying, but that’s a minor issue.  Then yesterday my internet went out and I had to deal with their customer service people to help get it going again, which took way longer than it should have taken.

I suppose all this is really minor stuff, so-called first world problems.  But things accumulate and interact with each other, especially when you don’t really have any outlet for anything and nothing to counteract them.  It might be better if I had someone with whom I could just hang out on a regular basis, but I feel like a different species than the people around me, and no one is offering, in any case.

This is all boring for all of you, I strongly suspect, so I apologize.  It’s bad enough for me to be unpleasant to myself, but I should try not to bring misery upon other people, especially people who are kind enough to read my blog.

Last week was certainly a miss with respect to getting anything done on any music or songs.  I didn’t so much as sing or play keyboard or play guitar at all last week, not once.  I did some reading, including finishing rereading The Chasm and the Collision, which is the book of which I am proudest.  If anyone out there knows people who enjoy fantasy/sci-fi adventures involving middle-schoolers, you should consider suggesting that they check it out.

I don’t know how this week is going to be.  I’m starting it in well-above-average pain, for me, and with worse sleep than usual (though that was the case most of last week as well).  I don’t think this guarantees that it will be a particularly bad week.  The world is complicated, and small things can make relatively large changes, and large things can sometimes be surprisingly ineffectual*.

Maybe I would get started writing fiction again and do it better if I did the first draft of a story by hand (as I did with CatC as well as Mark Red and the title story in Welcome to Paradox City).  As long-time readers will know, I go back and forth about this all the time, and I think I’m probably just chasing my tail.

I have all these dreams and ambitions, and I know I have the ability to carry them out, in some sense, but it’s very hard to keep the will, the motivation.

I’ve said before, I’m sure, that depression itself seems almost to be an illness of the will, a sort of muscular dystrophy or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis of the mind, though I think its causes and complications are much more intricate and multivariate than at least the first of those two comparisons.

I think for a fair amount of those who suffer badly from it, depression makes them want to kill themselves, but depression is also what keeps them from killing themselves; they cannot bring the effort to bear.  This is part of why the beginning of antidepressant therapy in a depressed person with suicidal ideation can be dangerous.  Such a person may begin to feel capable of getting things done, but not optimistic enough to avoid suicidal ideation, so they can sometimes use that new energy to act to kill themselves.

In any case, that’s not really the subject on which I was focused during this post.  I don’t think I’ve really been focused at all in writing this.  I don’t really know what subjects and topics I’ve raised.  I suppose you will know, more or less, having read this far.  And I guess, by the time I edit this, I will know.  But I don’t know right now.

It’s not important.  But one thing that is important is that I hope you all do your best to have a good day.

 *In the movie version of The Lord of the Rings, Galadriel says to Frodo that even the smallest person can change the course of the future, espousing a sort of rudimentary Chaos Theory.  But what does it mean to “change the course of the future”?  If the future has a course, it is defined and determined by the laws of physics, and any seeming “changes” were part of that process, so the course of the future is not “changed”, it is merely instantiated in whatever way it always is.

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Another eddy in the corrosive, chaotic cloud exuded by my mind

Well, it’s just another moronic Monday (with apologies to the Bangles).  I did not do any work on Native Alien this weekend.  To be fair, it’s basically complete with respect to chords and of course words and melody‒though I don’t preclude any modest changes along the way, and certainly I have not arranged it.  But I basically didn’t do anything useful or productive over the weekend, I just vegetated by myself.

I intended to do some biking; I went so far as to pump the tires up to their target pressure and everything.  But as often happens, I got anxious over getting on the bike to ride*.  I did some walking, at least; not very much, but at least I took some precautions that have mostly spared my knees and my ankle.

I mean to do a decent walk this evening and get that bit more of exercise in.  I’m trying to get healthier, but it’s hard to motivate myself when I don’t even want me to be healthy.  I don’t like myself.  Almost everything about me is frustrating or even infuriating.

But if walking can help me be slightly healthier, it may make me less annoying, in that I hopefully will feel less pain and irritation.  So, I don’t really care about my own well-being to any significant degree, but I want this stupid body to be as minimally uncomfortable as I can make it.

I’m supposed to start working this week on the lyrics to my next song, with the takeoff word “humility” this time.  I already have a few ideas, though I don’t know if they’ll be what shows up finally.  I also intend to do a quick, low quality “demo” of Native Alien that I may share here on this blog.  That way people can hear the tune I have in mind for it.

I didn’t do any Brilliant stuff over the weekend, but that’s okay.  I do that in much the same way that I have my physics and calculus text books and so on:  to keep alive the pipe dream of actually getting to a level of expertise in the various subjects to be able to do something useful.  But I don’t think I really ever will do those things.

Not that there’s anything wrong with learning just for the sake of understanding the world better.  Indeed, it’s a kind of hunger, a wish to take more and more of the universe into my mind, and thereby to “own” more of it, in the only sense that really works.  But it seems unlikely that I will ever find the time and/or the energy to achieve the level of expertise I would like to achieve in those various subjects.

Plus, honestly, my interest in one subject is constantly being derailed by something else, though it happens over relatively long time-scales.  That’s one of the reasons it was good for me to be enrolled in programmed curricula; I don’t have to worry as much about being distracted because I need to do certain things in a certain order at certain times.  Not that I can’t stay focused on something in which I’m interested; I can do that to a borderline psychotic level sometimes.  But I can’t readily choose which interest is going to grab me at a given moment.

Of course, most people don’t do what they want to do most of the time.  We all do what we must‒or else we die young, or suffer, or what have you; sometimes more than one bad outcome ensues.  Of course, even when we do what we must‒by whatever measure you want to determine that “mustness”‒we often accrue negative consequences.

I’ve tried very hard to do what I “must” throughout my life, for as long as I can remember.  I tried to live a clean life and to be productive and prosperous, to be useful to people who mattered to me and to innocent strangers and all that stuff.  I never knowingly or willingly, let alone willfully, committed crimes (other than minor speeding and so on), but I still ended up spending three years incarcerated and lost my medical license and much of what was left of my connection with my children, a good deal of which had already been hammered by my chronic pain problem and all the “fun” it gave me.

Also, of course, it turns out that all along I had ASD (of two varieties, the first having been fixed by open-heart surgery, and there may be some problem with that discovered a few years ago, but I’m not bothering looking into that, as there would be little point).  That doesn’t tend to have made things easier, I guess, though I have no direct point of comparison, since I have always been I.

I don’t know what point I’m trying to make, which probably means I’m not trying to make any point, I’m just meandering in my mind and sharing the dubious results with you, o injudicious reader.  Hopefully this isn’t too much of a bummer with which to start your work week.

But, hey, I’m not making you read this, am I?  If anything, I would advise against it, as I would advise pretty much anyone against wasting any time, effort, emotional investment, what have you, in me.  I’m a black cloud.  In the final analysis, I bring nothing but corrosion and discomfort and misery to those who spend too much time in my vicinity, literally or figuratively.

You should try to find something more pleasant if you can.

*I’ve only recently come to the (admittedly fairly obvious) conclusion that a big part of my anxiety about biking is because I have had at least two accidents on bicycles that hurt my shoulders‒a connective/soft tissue injury on the left that still causes my trouble, and a fractured scapula on the right (which healed very completely, as bones tend to do).

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Progress and (good) regress reports

I’ll start with the good regress:  I’m feeling significantly closer to baseline pain levels today than I was the last few days‒at least so far, though the day has only just begun.  I suppose I could have just said that I feel “better” today, but I fear that could be construed as meaning that I feel “all better”, which is not true and hasn’t been true for many, many years.

Still, I would rather be at my current level of chronic pain than the pain I was in yesterday or the day before.  And it should probably go without saying that I would pick either state over the pain I had while my kidney stone was present (and the irritation from the ureteral stent over the subsequent two weeks was nearly as bad, largely because it persisted for those few weeks).

I didn’t get a lot of work done on Native Alien yesterday, though I did progress a little.  I also don’t have anything down regarding the new song-takeoff word “humility”.  I’m beginning to think that I should stick to a song every two weeks, because I just have too much else going on to be able to achieve a song a week.

I also think I may need to buy a new small keyboard (the piano kind, not the typing kind) to use at the office, because I really have a somewhat difficult time trying to work out chords for a tune when I’m trying to play the tune on the guitar and then to play the chords on the guitar and see how they sound together.  I can’t really do both at once on a guitar, but on a keyboard it’s a piece of piss (as Brits might say).  Also, singing while figuring out the chords is difficult because my pitch in singing can be influenced by the chord I’m playing, and I might mistakenly adjust the tune to the chords instead of the other way around, without realizing that I have done so.

So, we’ll see.  I may order a new, relatively small keyboard for the office.  It would need to be inexpensive, but that should be pretty doable*.

I have continued to do the Brilliant course on circuits, which remains quite basic.  It’s a far cry from when I started doing their course on linear algebra, which I had never formally studied.  Don’t get me wrong; that’s a very cool and good course, and it applies to things in which I’m very interested, such as General Relativity in particular, but I got distracted in the middle of it‒I think I should have started by reviewing the fundamentals first.

I am currently reading a book called Vector, which goes into the history and mathematical theory of vectors and tensors, via quaternions and so on, and that’s pretty cool.  I find that learning the history of science and mathematics really helps get the subjects into my head.

As for other matters, well, there’s not much else going on.  Today is payroll day at work, so it will be somewhat hectic, but there’s no holiday or anything to warp the schedule.  Hopefully that means everything will go pretty smoothly.  At least I won’t have to be in as much pain while doing it as I might be.

I’m trying very hard to get back into doing more regular exercise, but trying to avoid causing exacerbations to my chronic pain while doing so.  It’s a bit of a tightrope walk, so to speak.  If I screw up, while it doesn’t lead to me literally plummeting to my death, it can set me back and make me feel terribly discouraged.

I had intended to try to ride my bike to the train this morning, but starting yesterday afternoon it began to rain quite heavily all throughout the area, so I didn’t get a chance to pump up the tires and whatnot.  This morning it was not raining, but it is supposed to rain on and off throughout the day, so biking isn’t so attractive.  I guess I’ll just wait on that and do some extra walking if I can.

Sorry, I know this is probably really dull and uninspiring reading.  I don’t know what to say about that.  I just spew these blog posts out as they come, so I don’t claim much more responsibility for the quality of the content than you can claim while reading it.

I will keep you updated on progress on my song(s) and of course you will see my writing.  I suppose, if I should try to start writing fiction again, I’ll let you know about that, but I don’t think that’s likely to happen any time soon.  There’s too much other stuff going on, and I’d need to stop doing this blog every day but Thursday.  I doubt that anyone would actually feel bereft if I stopped writing, but I flatter and delude myself that maybe it would be so.

I hope once more that you all have a very good day, and I reiterate that, no matter what, you will have the best day you could possibly have.  Don’t let that stop you from trying to ensure that this particular best day is really a very, very good one.  You might as well try.

*Addendum:  I looked on Amazon and there was a well-rated, small “beginners'” keyboard by Yamaha that can be delivered by tomorrow and was quite inexpensive, so…reader, I ordered it.

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Some words about words to put to music and orthogonal pain

Well, it’s Tuesday, and here’s my blog post.  I’ve had a very rough day and night, I’m afraid.  Not just my back and hips and shoulders and so on, but as I told my boss when he asked me, “Every fucking thing hurts.”  I left the office about 45 minutes early, and got on the really crowded train that I would usually have avoided.  At least at the house I was able just to lay down, but I’d already taken a lot of (OTC) stuff to do what I could about my pain.  But it has certainly not gone completely away since yesterday; it hasn’t completely gone away for a couple of decades.  But it is still worse than usual.

In spite of the above difficulties, I did a little work on Native Alien yesterday morning.  For one thing, I retranscribed the melody onto real staff paper, because the crudely drawn staffs on which I had previously written it were very small and unwieldy.  Then I worked on the chords, confirming that, yes, the song (as I sang the melody when I made it up) is in the key of F major/D minor and indeed the initial chord should be D minor (this implies an overall minor key, but it is not dispositive).  I’m not sure of all the chords yet; I was in too much discomfort to keep working on it.

I also did my coin-flipping binary search for a new song topic/subject/trigger, and that trigger word is:  humility.

That could be quite an interesting take-off for a song idea.  It makes me think of Billy Joel’s song, Honesty.  Of course, I haven’t even begun writing down any lyrics yet, nor even really thinking of them, but I’m sure my subconscious mind is cranking away.  It always seems to be making progress; remember what I said yesterday about how, after a break, I sometimes come back better at something than I was before the break?

I may post here below the lyrics of Native Alien just for your perusal*, though not really for feedback unless you feel a burning need.  Here they are, in the first draft.  Bear in mind, there would/will likely be modifications to the wording in any final version that might one day come to exist of the song.

The planet Earth is beautiful

A gem in outer space

But I feel like a stranger here

As if I’m from some other place.

–

The humans are like aliens

They often make no sense

Their gives and takes and lies and fakes

Make me feel better on the fence.

–

Could I just be some kind of native alien,

Delivered by some ET stork that got its signals crossed?

Is it possible that I

don’t belong beneath this sky,

an entity who’s home but still is lost?

–

Do people that you meet seem strange

And even ones you know?

You study them to learn their ways

But it just leaves you in a daze

Unsure who’s really friend or foe.

–

Could you just be some kind of native alien

A seed that germinated here in unfamiliar soil?

Is it possible that you

Don’t belong beneath this sky so blue,

a mortal wrapped in some mistaken coil?

Again, I’ll remind anyone reading that A) this is the draft form, which may change, and B) the point of this exercise is just to write something, not to try to produce a masterpiece.

I know that not all of the lines quite scan, but that’s something that can be adjusted in the singing process.  Think of how Jimi Hendrix squeezed the words “Whatever it is, that girl put a spell on me” into the same musical phrase and length as “‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky”.  I’m no Jimi, of course‒for one thing, I’m right-handed, so I don’t have to reverse-string my Strat‒but I do what I can.

I haven’t done any more thinking on my ideas of quantum wave-functions literally back-propagating through time and interfering retroactively with earlier parts of themselves and other waves to set up a potential cause for superdeterminism or something else.  For one thing, as I said, I need to seriously advance my mathematical prowess with QFT and such before I can determine if there’s any real potential to the idea.  Also, it’s hard to think about abstract, four-dimensional complex time stuff when you’re in a lot of pain.

I did log in to Brilliant dot org as I mentioned I intended to do yesterday, where I quickly saw that they had a new course on circuits, and I couldn’t resist getting started on that rather than working toward that other notion.  The basics so far are, well, really basic, but that’s okay.  It’s still better to do something like that in one’s spare time rather than participate in outrage on social media‒even though that outrage is often justified.

Oh, well.  I’m still tired.  I’ll try to work on the Native Alien tune a bit more and probably tweak the lyrics, but I’ll also try to come up with some words related to “humility”.  That could be fun, at least.

I hope you all have a very good, relatively pain-free day.

*It seems I have done so.

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Chords in music and in time

It’s Monday again, the start of another work week‒that is, if your work week begins on Monday.  In the modern world‒and indeed, perhaps always‒there are many people whose work weeks start on days other than Monday.  I suspect, though, that the majority of people still work their week starting on Monday, at least in the West, though it may not be a large majority.  If anyone out there has easy access to any rigorous statistics on the matter, I would be interested to learn.  On the other hand, I’m not going to seek the information on my own, so it’s not a tragedy if no readers have it.  I like trivia, but this is definitely quite trivial, at least from my point of view.

I hope you all had a good weekend.  My own was not very interesting, and I felt tired, but then again, I did have a cold starting in the middle of last week, so I guess I was still recovering.  I feel as though that particular infirmity is reasonably well on its way.

I worked a little on the chords of last week’s song, Native Alien, though not very much.  At least at the house I have my keyboard, so I can play melody and chords at once to confirm which chords sound best to me.  Interestingly, it seems that the chord to start the song (at least the melody) will be a C major chord, which is the V chord of the key of F major (though if the song could be considered to be in D minor, it would be the VII chord).  This is not unusual, of course, nor particularly noteworthy.  It’s just interesting for me to recognize specific facts to which I didn’t pay attention when I wrote earlier songs, because I’ve thought more about music theory since then, probably because of the guitar.  It’s a curiosity for me.

Speaking of songs, today I plan to do another round of flipping coins to pick a basic topic, or subject, or trigger‒whatever might be the better term‒for another song (lyrics) for this week.  Of course, last week’s word, Earth, didn’t really become the subject of the song, just a takeoff point, but that’s fine.  The idea was just to give me some way to give myself a start.

In other news, I had a weird thought last night after watching one of Sabine Hossenfelder’s latest videos.  I wrote an email to myself about the thought so I wouldn’t forget it, and I’ll include that text here, so you‒yes, you‒can see what you think (I have edited this text for clarity and to correct typos):

“If the overall arrow of time is caused by the tendency toward increase in entropy from a lower to a higher entropy state (“Big Bang” to heat death, at the cosmic level), that could behave analogously to a current (like in the ocean, not a wire).  Meanwhile, locally*, we know that the laws of physics don’t appear to have any directionality time-wise.  So perhaps locally, matter and wave interferences in the sense of quantum wavefunctions can happen not just in space but in time itself and the future can feedback on the past, just not in such a large way that it would overwhelm the overall tendency (though maybe even that is not impossible).  The effect of such a temporally retrograde wave wouldn’t flow backwards so fast that it would override the current itself (probably).  However, that wave could still affect its predecessor, creating standing interference patterns in time and things along those lines that might be the source of so-called super determinism.  Think about this a little bit.”

That last injunction was intended for me, but if any of you want to think about it, you’re welcome to do so (it’s not as though I could stop you even if I wished to stop you, which I don’t).  Of course, if I’m going to really explore this notion, I’m going to need to bone up on my mathematical physics in a serious way, and it’s always hard to find the time.  That’s always been a bit of a weakness of mine:  I get very interested in something and develop skills in it because of my interest, then something else catches my attention, and soon all my energy goes there.  I don’t tend to forget the things I learned previously, at least, and sometimes when I return to them, I even find that I’m better than I was before (e.g., after not playing guitar for quite a while, when I picked it up again, certain songs or chords with which I had trouble before had become much easier).

Also, of course, the fact that I have to work for a living is another distraction.  I really do need some ultra-wealthy patron out there to provide me with living and intellectual resources so that I can devote my time to my wonderful pursuits without having to earn my living.  I also want world peace, world freedom…and a unicorn.

I guess in the meantime I should probably go back to using Brilliant dot org to spruce myself up in terms of mathematics and physics (and computer science in the meantime, why not?).  I have an annual subscription (supporting Sabine Hossenfelder, whom I mentioned earlier), so I might as well use it.  It’s a better use for my spare time than diddling around on social media.

Okay, well, I hope you all have a very good day, and that it is the beginning of a very good week for you.

*I’m using the colloquial meaning of “locally” her not the strict physics definition of locality.

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Songs from a life less interesting*****

In case it wasn’t obvious, I did not go to work yesterday.  I have a head cold of some variety that seemed to begin in the afternoon on Wednesday‒maybe it started sooner than that, I’m not sure.  Anyway, I stayed at the house yesterday, trying to rest.  But I was pretty stuffed up, which I still am, and now my mouth is dry from (apparent) mouth-breathing when I slept.

Sorry, I know this is really dull material.  Such is life, I guess.  Or, at least, such is my life.  I suppose a dull life is better than many of the lives that would make for more interesting reading.  This was a point I first recall encountering in The Hobbit, when Bilbo remarked that his time in Rivendell would make boring reading, though it was wonderful to experience.

I think it is possible to have an exciting or at least interesting life that does not fall prey to the curse of “may you live in interesting times”.  I think it is possible to have a life that most people would find fascinating to hear about, and which is also quite fulfilling to experience.  But it does seem that this is a relatively small subset of available lives.

For the most part, humans seem to prefer stories about harrowing, horrific things.  This is not restricted to fiction, but is also part of why news media tend to focus on the more dire and terrifying news stories.

Of course, there are probably good, sound biological reasons for this.  As a matter of survival, it’s crucial to attend to danger and threat much more so than to pleasant, routine, comfortable things, because those creatures that don’t become extra alert and energetic when danger is present are less likely to leave offspring than are those that respond with arousal*.  So the fact that many of our favorite stories describe horrible things may be analogous to why so many of our snacks are very sweet and/or very salty:  a supranormal stimulus increases engagement powerfully, and can easily become habit-forming.

How in the world did I get on that subject?  I’m not sure.  I guess I could go back and reread this to find out, but I’ll be doing that when I edit it, anyway, so I’m not going to waste my time now.

In other news, I wrote a second verse for my “weekly” song on Wednesday afternoon, and even took a little notebook with me with the song paper in it, so I can continue the process wherever I might be.  Unfortunately, I did not work on it at all yesterday, but then again, I didn’t really work on anything yesterday.  I’ll try to write a chorus and then a third verse today.

I have to remind myself that I’m not trying to produce something superb, even assuming I could do that on command.  I’m just trying to produce something**.  So if it feels a little inane and contrived to me, well, that’s okay.  It’s just got to be some “song”.

I use quotes there because I am really starting with the poem, the lyrics, which is “usually” how I do things.  I don’t know if I’ll be able to do lyrics and music within one week on the same song.  At least so far, that pace doesn’t seem to be in the process of being achieved, though I suppose I might finish the song and come up with a melody over the weekend.  Or maybe what I can do is make songs in a kind of assembly-line style:  lyrics this week, then next week, while coming up with lyrics for another song, do the melody for the first song.

I have heard that most songwriters tend to do melodies first and then come up with lyrics.  That may be a true statistical statement, but I know it’s not the way everyone does it, because at least two of my favorites do otherwise.

We know, of course, that Elton John writes the music after Bernie Taupin writes the lyrics, by their own description of their songwriting process.  And, of course, many operas and musicals start with the libretto***, and the music is written afterward.  And Roger Waters, one of the best lyricists ever****, implies in The Wall that he writes his lyrics as poems, e.g., “I’ve got a little black book with my poems in…”, and also e.g., the scene in the movie where young Pink has his poem book, which contains the lyrics for the song Money, discovered by the oppressive teacher.

So, writing lyrics and then making a melody afterward wouldn’t put me in bad company (though I don’t know how the band Bad Company actually wrote their songs).

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  Batman knows if I was even coherent.  I suppose the editing will make that somewhat clearer, but my mind might be fuzzy enough that I cannot even tell in the immediate editing period.  But you will know.  So, please, have patience with me.

And have a good day and a good weekend, also, if you’re able.

*There’s nothing sexy in this use of the word, just to be clear.  I’m not referring to creatures that get “turned on” by danger and threat; those types of creatures seem less likely to survive than their compatriots, ceteris paribus.

**Not the Beatles song.  I already did a cover of that, anyway.

***Italian for “little book”, in case that wasn’t obvious.

****As evidence:  He wrote almost all of the lyrics for Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals, and The Wall.

*****I feel like this could be a good album title.

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“You’d say I’m puttin’ you on, but it’s no joke…”

I’m writing this on my smartphone today, a more or less deliberate choice, as much as anything we do is truly deliberate.  I was already very tired when I left work yesterday, but now it’s even worse, because I got very little sleep last night, even for me.  I’m quite worn out in general.  By rights, I ought to stay at the house, but Wednesday is payroll day, and anyway, I’m more comfortable at the office than I am in my room.  Or, at least, being at work is as good as my days get.

I may or may not go to work tomorrow depending on how I’m feeling.  Even if I go to work, I may or may not write a blog post.  I honestly barely have the gumption to write what I’m writing now.

I haven’t written any of the “Earth” song lyrics for my weekly (or whatever) song yet*, but I have been thinking about them and what approach to take.  I considered doing something that references the idea from Ann Rice’s vampire stories of going into the Earth to rest or escape, but I did a quick Google search and there are already several songs with the title Into the Earth (though I have no idea what the songs are about) which I guess isn’t surprising.  They were very popular books, and the notion of a vampire going “into the Earth” is evocative.

So, I’ll take another approach, perhaps discussing coming up from the Earth or some such.  We’ll see.  I guess I don’t really have to take it too seriously.

Boy, am I tired.  I was already worn out and stressed and tense at the end of the workday yesterday (there were reasons, but I won’t go into them), and now I feel worse.  A person really ought to feel better after having spent the evening and night in their private place in the house, but it’s not so with me in this case.  Honestly, I considered sending for an Uber and just going into the office at about 1:30 in the morning or so, but I decided that would seem too weird; I think the boss gets notifications when the alarm is turned on and when it is turned off.

I’ve been thinking back to when I had my kidney stone‒it’s only been two months‒and about how I sometimes wish it had been some more deadly affliction, or perhaps even that when they did the CT scan they might have found some lesion somewhere in my abdomen or pelvis that indicated some untreatable illness‒cancer or something similar.  Then everything would be taken out of my hands.  I could just find some doctor from whom I could get palliative care when necessary and then wait for the end.  I mean, in a way, that’s what I’m doing anyway‒it’s what everyone is doing‒but it’s vague and indefinite right now.

I’m sorry to be so morbid.  I know most people don’t like to think about death and dying, let alone to “speak” about it.  Then again, the Tao te Ching counsels us to embrace death with our whole being.  It’s pretty clear that it doesn’t mean that we should worship or love death, à la “we love death more than you love life”.  Quite the contrary.  I read it as saying that you will only be able to enjoy life fully and wisely if you internalize and accept the fact that you are going to die someday.

Once again, we find that Tyler Durden captured at least some ancient wisdom in his “teachings”.

Anyway, my own fanciful yearning for a terminal diagnosis has nothing to do with a healthy and wise attitude toward my own mortality.  No, my yearning is born of simple mental exhaustion, of chronic pain for more than two decades, of chronic insomnia for even longer than that, and of depression/dysthymia with concurrent “anxiety” that is only superseded in length by my recently diagnosed neurodevelopmental disorder, which is congenital.

Unfortunately, I see no evidence that any of these things is likely to go away‒especially the latter one‒and I’m just puttering around here in south Florida, accompanied by various arthropods and reptiles and fungi and humidity and rain and heat and one of the most idiotic state governments the nation has ever seen.  And I am just so very tired.

So, anyway, that’s that.  If I write a post tomorrow, it will be here, of course.  If I don’t, it won’t.  If that’s not clear to anyone, please let me know in the comments (I’m kidding, I know you all understand, though you should certainly feel free to leave comments).  If I make any progress on writing a song, I’ll let you know about that when it happens.

I hope you have a good day.

*Addendum:  Between rounds of editing this post, I came up with a possible first verse of a song.  I won’t share it right now, but it’s a start.

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“Wednesday morning, papers didn’t come.  Thursday night, your stockings needed mending*.”

Well, it’s Wednesday, and I’m feeling a bit better than I have so far this week.  Perhaps I really did have a virus of some type that my body has been fighting.  If so, it triggered/worsened symptoms of already existing pathologies in my body—in my back and hips and shoulders and other joints, and so on—in addition to making me feel achy and feverish, though without the actual fever.

I can’t really blame my psychopathology on a virus, unless it’s some form of mental virus**, or more likely some lifelong accumulation thereof.  Such “viruses” are rarely acute and self-limited, though they could be, I suppose.  What, after all, is a momentary fad or brief obsession, perhaps with a song, or the spread of a particularly funny new joke, that goes away before long?

I don’t really think my mental issues are primarily caused by acute memetic infection, if you will.  They started a long time ago.  In any case, my brain is apparently of an atypical type, at least based on my autism diagnosis, and that creates a substrate on which supervening inputs can become prone to cause certain forms of pathology.  Depression and anxiety are two of those things that are very common in those with ASD—significantly more so than in the general population***.  The statistics on autism indicate that suicidal ideation and attempted and successful**** suicide are much more common in people with ASD than in so-called neurotypicals.

I often think of depression—at least in some of its forms—as a sort of weather-pattern in the mind that becomes self-sustaining in the right circumstances, rather like a hurricane or other massive storm system.  One doesn’t find hurricanes in environments that are not conducive to them—Siberia and the like, for instance—but in minds that are the metaphorical equivalent of the tropics, such mental storm systems may be much more common, and sometimes very destructive.

Who knows, maybe ECT treatment for severe and recalcitrant depression is something akin to the (ill-advised) notion of dropping large nukes in the middle of a hurricane to disrupt its pattern.  If hurricanes occasionally had the tendency to obliterate all or even most life on Earth, we might be willing to try something as extreme as dropping nuclear weapons in a developing tropical storm system to disrupt it, if we could find no other solution.

I wonder if even the large storm cells that occur over places like the great plains of North America could be considered something like episodes of depression (the fact that some weather systems are called “depressions” relates to the barometric pressure, and should not be construed as in any way related to psychiatric depression, other than etymologically).  To what would a “super cell” that produces massive tornados be analogous?

Of course, there need be no actual analogy, because the weather concept is a metaphor, really.  But it is not completely a metaphor, so I don’t think it’s too frivolous to push the notion further in order to trigger some thoughts.  Complex systems like the brain and the weather, with internal feedbacks and feedforwards and “feedsidewayses” that can lead to vicious and/or virtuous cycles can have actual attributes in common if looked at in the right way.

It’s a bit akin to how the motion of a pendulum and the oscillation of a circuit and the “probability waves” of quantum mechanics can be described by very similar mathematics.  Also, the relations between pressure, flow, and friction in fluid dynamics with voltage, current, and resistance in electric circuits are almost spookily alike.

This probably demonstrates something rather fundamental in the nature of reality.  Perhaps it’s distantly related to the fact that geometry seems to have a deeper influence on the workings of reality than one might at first think, as evidenced by the ubiquity of Pythagorean relations and the appearance of Pi (π) in often surprising places.

This is all speculative stuff, and I’m not being very rigorous in my thoughts, though I’m trying not to be too frivolous.  But I think this is a good place to wrap up this post for today.  I hope you all are doing well and that you continue to do well, and even better, that you improve at least a little bit, in at least some way, every day.  You might as well.

*Has anyone reading ever actually mended their stockings (or darned their socks, as in another Beatles song, Eleanor Rigby)?  I have mended a sock at least once in my life, and probably more than once, but nowadays socks are so readily available that I tend just to throw them away when a hole develops.  I guess that’s a testament to how “spoiled” we are in the modern world.  Incidentally, I added the Thursday part of Lady Madonna to this quote-based title because I realized that I’m never likely to use it on an actual Thursday blog post, because for those I use mutated quotes from Shakespeare.

**In his classic book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” as a replicator of the mind, and it has become a useful scientific term, in addition to being a slightly imprecise shorthand for usually humorous pictures of various kinds shared online.  Such memes can become highly potent self-replicators in various senses, and they can combine in ways that make them more prone to spread, in “meme-plexes” of various kinds.  Some are useful for the organism, and so could be considered beneficial viruses (memetic rather than genetic) while others can become terribly destructive, at least in certain circumstances.  Certainly the mind-virus(es) associated with the Jim Jones cult was/were lethal to most of those who were infected.  Likewise with the Heaven’s Gate viruses.  Some of such comparisons can be a bit glib, but others are robust and can be subject to rigorous study.

***I’m not referring to a prison-based “general population”, though at times the metaphor of modern society as a prison is truly warranted, especially for those of us with atypical brains.

****There are times when I would think of a completed suicide as indeed a thoroughgoing success, i.e., a positive thing overall, but here I’m just using the term “successful” to mean “having completed what was intended, as intended”.

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Tuesdays too many

I want to begin with a minor caveat (added here after the first draft):  I don’t feel that I’m writing very well, today.  I apologize for this, and I will try not to make it a habit.

It’s now Tuesday morning, and today I am writing this on my mini laptop computer.  Even though I felt pretty crappy all day yesterday—recall that I was sore all over, and it was particularly bad in my “usual suspect” joints and such—I decided I still didn’t want to write anything on my smartphone today again, so I brought the computer back to the house with me.

The bases of my thumbs continued (and continue) to be sore, and the process of writing on the stupidphone doesn’t get any more pleasant as I go along.  Anyway, today I feel a little less achy all over than yesterday, probably thanks to fairly high doses of three different OTC analgesics/anti-inflammatories.

I still feel vaguely as if I am fighting some flu-like syndrome, except I have no fever that I can detect and no other localizing symptoms.  I just feel blah and bleagh, as though all sorts of cytokines are flowing through my body, all those interleukins and interferons and prostaglandins and the like, making me feel as though I am beset by some infection.

As for everything else—well, the world at large continues to be comically tragic and tragically comical, more so of both than usual, and that’s stressful as well.  And there is no more apparent point to participating in any of it, or indeed in anything at all, today than there was yesterday.

But, nevertheless* I am going to the office.  What would I do otherwise?  Lie about back at the house, in my little room, and just…I don’t know, try to pass my time somehow?  It’s not as though I can readily sleep when there; I slept quite a bit less than three hours total last night, and it was not all in a row.  So, if I’m grumpy, I hope you’ll forgive me.  If you won’t, well…I don’t really give too much of a shit.

As for what to write today, well, I guess you’re reading it, whatever it is.  I have no specific topic, or subject, other than the general notion that I’m writing and sharing my thoughts, such as they are, as they stream through my consciousness in response to my obsessive-compulsive urge to write this blog every workday, even though I have no overarching subject about which to write.

I would love to be able to discuss some interesting subject in physics or mathematics or biology—or even medicine, which technically is part of biology—but though there are surely many interesting things being explored and discovered and discussed, they all seem pointless to me.  My state of mind is definitely not good if even my favorite sciences (and science-adjacent subjects) are incapable of grabbing my interest.

So, all I have to discuss, if that’s the right term, is that my chronic pain continues, and my dysthymia/depression continues, and my social anxiety continues, as does my general free-floating hostility.  All these latter things are at least partly triggered and/or exacerbated by my ASD, which is something that is never going to stop for as long as I’m alive—which has already been too long.

I’ve done pretty much all the good I’m ever going to do in the world, probably.  And I did do some good here and there.  Of course, the best thing I ever did was to father my children, so that’s one thing.  But I also contributed to scientific advancement in my own tiny little way, and I did a pretty good job of relieving suffering in my patients, and saving people’s lives**.  And I wrote my books, which very few people will ever read, but which I nevertheless think are pretty decent, and I wrote and recorded some songs, which very few people will ever hear, but which I nevertheless think are also pretty decent.

It would be nice if I felt able to write fiction again, I guess, but even the process of trying seems terribly daunting.  There is little expected reward, since probably no one but my sister will end up reading anything I write in the future (fiction-wise, anyway), if there is such writing, which seems unlikely.  And it’s almost laughable to think that I might write and record any new songs.

Also, in the end, I have always failed at everything that really matters to me.

So, I’m pretty much just coasting along, waiting for my momentum to be used up.  It’s annoyingly persistent, but I guess I can only blame some metaphorical translational symmetry for that conservation of metaphorical momentum.  I’m probably pushing the metaphor too far (a process that is itself metaphorical), but that’s what I tend to do.

I’m sorry to be such a downer.  Even worse, I’m sorry to be so boring.  It’s not personal; though it’s also not strictly business, either.  I don’t know what it is.  I’m at a loss.  But that too seems just to be my usual state.  Perhaps I’ve never been otherwise.

I hope all of you feel better than I feel today, and every day.  I hope that, even on days when I feel good—if there ever are such days again in my life, which feels pretty unlikely—that you all still feel better than I do.  Why not?  The bar is set pretty low, but at least that means there’s plenty of room for you to be boosted up.

*Is it redundant to say “but, nevertheless”?  I suspect that it is.

**Though I dislike that expression somewhat; “saving lives” is always just saving them for later, since everyone dies eventually.